Mississippi

The Mississippi Delta is the flat, rich floodplain between the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers, and it is where one kind of blues took shape: a single voice and a guitar, often played with a slide, on porches and at plantation parties.

It was played there for years before anyone wrote it down. Delta blues existed around 1900 and was first recorded in the late 1920s. Charley Patton traveled to Grafton, Wisconsin, to record for Paramount in 1929. Robert Johnson cut his only sessions in San Antonio in 1936 and Dallas in 1937. In 1941 Alan Lomax recorded Muddy Waters at Stovall, Mississippi, and by the early 1950s Waters, Howlin' Wolf and Little Walter were plugging in amplifiers in Chicago and building a new sound.

The poster puts it in one frame. A man in a fedora, white shirt and suspenders sits on a porch with an acoustic guitar across his knee, his face turned down toward his hands. Behind him a paddlewheel steamboat rests on the river beneath a willow, and in the foreground two pink wading birds stand in tall grass near a fence post. The palette is indigo and amber, with 'Land of the Blues' above him and 'From the Delta to the River' below.